Rebecca Mott
Founder @ ReThought
United States
“Nothing says ‘I don’t trust you’ like a mandatory 8:30 AM daily sync on a Monday.”
That line showed up in a Glassdoor review. Not a leadership journal. Not a consulting report. A Glassdoor review, written by someone describing their workplace to a stranger on the internet, hoping the next candidate would read it before accepting the offer.
In recent weeks, I’ve been paying attention to what people are saying about meetings across LinkedIn, Reddit, Glassdoor, TikTok, and other platforms. Not the thought leadership posts. The raw ones. The frustrated ones. The ones people write at 4:30 pm on a Friday or after walking out of something they can’t quite name.
What I found wasn’t a complaint about bad agendas or too many Zoom calls. It was something deeper. People aren’t just frustrated with their meetings. They’re reading them. They’re decoding them. And what they’re finding in that decoding is information about the organizations they work for, information that leadership often doesn’t realize it’s broadcasting.
“This could have been an email is no longer a meme. It’s a prayer.”
There is a scene early in my book, The Meeting Room, where two colleagues walk out of separate meetings on the same afternoon and land on the same sidewalk, frustrated for the same reason. Joan, a first-time team leader, has just watched a carefully prepared agenda dissolve into chaos. Michelle, a veteran known for running tight, orderly sessions, looks at her and says: “It’s like every meeting is Groundhog Day. We rehash the same items, and I feel like I’m the only one who notices.”
I wrote that scene because I’ve lived it. Most of us have.
And here’s what I’ve learned from three decades of watching those moments play out: the problem Michelle is describing isn’t a meeting problem. It’s a culture problem. The meeting is just where it becomes visible.
Culture, at its most basic, is the way we do things around here. It’s the unwritten rules that govern who speaks, who decides, whose concerns are taken seriously, and what happens when someone raises a problem. Culture doesn’t live in the corporate mission statement. It doesn’t live in the employee handbook. It lives in patterns of behavior, repeated over time, until those patterns stop feeling like choices and start feeling like the way things are. And nowhere are those patterns more consistently on display than in the meetings that take place every working day.
A meeting is a system inside a larger system.
What happens in the room doesn’t originate in the room. It arrives there, carried in by the people sitting around the table, who bring with them all of those unwritten rules about how things actually work around here. The meeting doesn’t create those rules. It reflects them. And then, depending on how it’s designed, it either reinforces them or begins to shift them.
Once you understand culture that way, the signals hiding in plain sight become hard to ignore.
Take the “optional” meeting that everyone knows isn’t optional. The invite lands in your inbox with that tag, and the calculation happens instantly, unconsciously. You know your absence will be noted. You know someone will reference the discussion in your next one-on-one as though you were there, because in a culture where presence equals participation, the tag is fiction and everyone knows it. You click accept. Not because the meeting has a clear purpose, but because the culture has a clear expectation.
“The ‘optional’ tag on a meeting invite is a trap. If you don’t show up, you’re the one getting blamed for not being ‘aligned.'”
That’s information. Not about the meeting, but about the organization.
The same thing is happening, in a different form, when the All-Hands has its chat disabled. Employees read the signals in real time: leadership wants our attention, not input. The format answers the question before anyone asks it. And people adjust accordingly. They attend without arriving. They keep their cameras on while their minds wander elsewhere. They’ve learned, through repeated experience, that showing up and being heard are not the same thing in this place. Each All-Hands run that way teaches the lesson again, until eventually people stop expecting anything different.
“Management uses ‘All-Hands’ as a soapbox rather than a dialogue. There’s zero chance for anonymous feedback that actually gets addressed.”
That erosion of expectation is exactly what’s happening in Michelle’s Groundhog Day meeting. On the surface, it looks like a process failure. But underneath that, something more corrosive is happening. A team that keeps having the same conversation about the same problem week after week is a team that has stopped believing the conversation will lead anywhere. The original failure was the gap between what was being discussed and what people thought the problem was. The meeting just made that gap visible, and then made it permanent by repeating the pattern until it became the expectation.
“I feel like I’m in a recurring dream where we have the same meeting about the same problem every Tuesday and never solve it.”
What we are really talking about is this: every meeting is a small-scale expression of an organization’s culture. Inside of meetings, boundaries are drawn around who belongs, who speaks, and who decides.
Meetings reveal the organization’s values and how those values are built or fractured between stated values and actual behavior. In meetings, you see the perspectives it centers on and the ones it quietly excludes. Run that meeting the same way fifty times, and you haven’t just held fifty meetings. You’ve taught fifty lessons about what this place is.
Most leaders don’t see it that way, and I understand why. We’re trained to evaluate meetings on their own terms. Did we cover the agenda? Did we make a decision? Did we end on time? Those questions aren’t useless, but they’re asking about the container, not the contents. They miss the deeper question, which is: what did this meeting teach the people in it about how things work around here?
“The ‘meeting before the meeting’ is where all the actual decisions get made. The rest is just theater.”
The science supports this. A 30-year review of meeting research published in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior (Rogelberg, Kreamer, and Gray, 2025) frames meetings as expressions of culture and identity, not merely as tools for coordination. Repeated meeting patterns, they found, actively create and reveal organizational culture. The meeting is not separate from the culture. It is one of the primary places where culture gets made.
That means the design of your meetings is a leadership responsibility, not an administrative one.
It’s not about whether you have an agenda, though you should. It’s about whether your meetings reflect the kind of organization you’re trying to build. Whether the people in the room leave feeling like their presence mattered. Whether the decisions made in that hour actually hold, or quietly dissolve in the hallway afterward.
Here’s what I ask leaders to do before they touch a single meeting structure: stop diagnosing meetings and start reading them.
Look at who speaks first in your recurring meetings. Is it always the same person? That’s information about power and permission in your culture. Look at who stays silent. Is it always the same people? That’s information about psychological safety. Look at what happens after the meeting ends. Do decisions stick, or does the real conversation happen in the parking lot? That gap between what gets said in the room and what gets done outside it is one of the most revealing measures of whether your meeting culture is functioning or performing.
Once you can see those patterns, you can begin to design your meetings with more intention.
That design work isn’t complicated, but it requires intentionality. A check-in question that gives everyone equal entry into the room. A process that separates idea-generation from evaluation, so the loudest voice doesn’t crowd out the most original thinking. A clear distinction between conversations that inform and conversations that decide, so people stop leaving meetings uncertain about what just happened.
None of these are tricks. They are structural choices that send cultural signals.
“Our brainstorming sessions are actually collaborative. Ideas are judged on merit, not on who has the flashiest title in the room.”
That’s what it looks like when the design is working. It doesn’t require a personality transplant or a culture overhaul. It requires a leader who understands that how you run the room is how you run the organization.
Michelle’s Groundhog Day meeting didn’t need a better agenda. It needed a leader willing to ask a different question: not “what are we covering today,” but “what does this team need to believe, by the time we leave this room, in order to do the work?”
That question reframes the meeting as a design problem. And the meeting design can solve those problems, rather than focusing on personality or time management.
Your meetings are telling you something every single time they happen. The data has always been there. What changes now is what you choose to do with it. Culture doesn’t get built in strategy sessions or mission statements. It gets built in the room, one meeting at a time.
